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ENDLESS DIGITAL AQUARIUM

Currently being shown by MakeRoom Inc. in collaboration

with Artscape Daniels Launchpad as part of a projected art groupshow 'SpaceMarket' at Stackt Market, Toronto

1_original

1/25

24 digital copies are made of an original acrylic on canvas. These are played in a continuous loop, projected onto a surface.

Like the dying fish float in the aquarium as seen in Image 1, we float in a perpetual state of digital endlessness, with the potential to undo, redo and revise never exhausted.

On several established artist websites today, one can only buy prints. The original isn't even for sale. Websites onto which artists looking for a break can upload their work, take your image and give you a cut, they allow you to set a price for your work on every kind of product that the image would be printed on and you would retain a copyright in many cases.

But you cannot choose against having the image printed on cushion covers, yoga mats, coffee mugs, bath curtains, fleece blankets etc. Once you hand it over, your image is subject to a perpetuity of reproduction on myriad capitalist consumer paraphernalia.

Anchor 1

See Other Drawings

How many images can our world produce? If a single physical artwork can be remastered digitally 100 times to create a new, unique iteration every time, when will we stop? Or will it be endless?

This conundrum is demonstrated in the loop of images. The original began as an acrylic on Canvas, and depicted 3 strange fish, in a mass of pink water, aimlessly floating, spying the bottom of the tank, almost sinking. An endless amount of digital copies are made of this in Photoshop, to mimic the way art images are duplicated in the market economy.

As demonstrated in the loop, as the copies progress, their disconnection with the original progresses. They become more and more unlike the original, sometimes finding a new soul and new organising principles.

Even very slightly different copies are forced, as a metaphor for the very slightly different choices that we are afforded in the capitalist market economy of today's life, a disguise for there being no real choice at all.

The truth is, the economic state we live in affects what we would spend on. The average earner cannot afford art if it is not a product, if it is not utilitarian.

(Or at least pretends to be)

If it is not a home use object, the 'art work' finds its place as a home décor object- and is subject to matching the homeowner's rug, walls, furniture etc.

Why should a single image then not be available in every colour possible, to suit the consumer's interior décor fancy?

What is important in our world today then, does handmade physical art have any value as an artistic expression? Perhaps its digitally reproduced image has much more.

The loop of images is also a metaphor for our existence in the capitalistic world. The capitalist machine requires that all our clothes, homes, food choices be standardised, so that there is always a buyer for the multitude of goods produced- so that industry can keep churning.

Simultaneously it standardises us, so that we remain perfect buyers for the goods endlessly churned. Goods are sold to us in myriad colours and patterns- so as to pretend that they are different and cater to our differences.Yet on looking deeper, it is hard to miss that most goods and the pattern in which we buy them are the same, and only illustrate and force our sameness.

We must all be as good as the other, to fit neatly into roles that the machine needs. We repeat our daily activities endlessly, neatly ensconced in our glass boxes that we call homes; in our aquariums.

Like the moribund, dispassionate fish in the original painting, we are lifeless, directionless, endlessly repeating, with the only real direction or finality seemingly being the bottom of the tank or death.

Come COVID, our loops have become shorter and we wait to go back to the way we were, or hopefully, for the monotonous loop to break for good; to come out with a new world order.

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